Spherical spacers, called bead spacers, have generally been used as spacers for maintaining a cell gap between a color filter and a thin-film transistor (TFT) substrate in a liquid crystal display device. Bead spacers are unfixed and exist also in a display region of a liquid crystal, display device. The use of bead spacers therefore entails the problem of lowering of the display quality of a liquid crystal device due to disturbance in light scattering/transmission caused by bead spacers and to disturbance in orientation in the vicinities of bead spacers. The limits of such conventional spherical spacers have therefore been pointed out, and attention is drawn to columnar spacers that can be formed and arranged in fixed positions.
A known method for the formation of columnar spacers involves forming a transparent electrode layer and then forming a photosensitive resin layer, followed by exposure/patterning with a photomask (see e.g. patent document 1).
With the prices of liquid crystal display devices coming down these days, there is an increasing demand for reduction in the cost of a color filter, a component of a liquid crystal display device. In view of this, it is being studied to form columnar spacers by laminating colored layers, because this method can manufacture columnar spacers without providing an independent spacer manufacturing step.    Patent document 1: Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2001-324716
This method, however, has the drawback that when forming a transparent electrode layer after the formation of columnar spacers by the lamination of colored layers, the transparent electrode layer is exposed on the columnar spacers, which can cause short circuit between the electrode of the color filter and an electrode of a TFT substrate.
Upon the short circuit between the color filter electrode and the TFT substrate electrode, no voltage can be applied to liquid crystal molecules filling the gap between the color filter and the TFT substrate, making the liquid crystal display device inoperative.